At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in the surrounding neighborhood.

One of those buildings housed this newspaper. As night fell, reporters at The New York Times gloried in the steady illumination thrown off by Thomas Edison’s electric lamps. “The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight,” they reported in an article the following day.

Continue reading “Wired Bacteria Form Nature’s Power Grid: ‘We Have an Electric Planet’” →

The cuttlefish and its relatives, squid and octopuses, often strike human observers as floating aliens wreathed in sucker-covered limbs — boneless, squirming appendages that would seem to have nothing in common with our own arms and legs.

But hidden under the superficial differences, a new study shows, are some profound similarities: Human and cuttlefish limbs develop under the direction of the same genes. The new study, published on Tuesday in the journal eLife, lends weight to the theory that many animal appendages, from insect wings to fish fins, share a long evolutionary history.

Continue reading “Cuttlefish Arms Are Not So Different From Yours” →

Ladybugs briefly took over the news cycle.

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service were looking over radar images in California on the night of June 4 when they spotted what looked like a wide swath of rain. But there were no clouds.

The meteorologists contacted an amateur weather-spotter directly under the mysterious disturbance. He wasn’t getting soaked by rain. Instead, he saw ladybugs. Everywhere.

Continue reading “These Animal Migrations Are Huge — and Invisible” →

Some of the scenes in Mark Honigsbaum’s “The Pandemic Century” were so vivid they had me drafting movie treatments in my head. Midway through the book, I was picturing a doctor climbing the front steps of a rowhouse in Annapolis, Md., in the winter of 1930. His knock on the door goes unanswered, so he makes his way inside. An auto mechanic is sprawled in a living room chair, muttering in a feverish sleep. His wife wanders in from the bedroom, shouting gibberish. From the kitchen, her mother emerges unsteadily, a rattling cough rising up from deep in her lungs.

Continue reading “Ebola, H.I.V., Spanish Flu, SARS — the 20th Century’s Deadliest Hits” →